SITUATION #163

In her series Poems by Repetition, Natalie Czech uses found texts such as magazine articles, instruction manuals or dictionary entries to examine the relationship between text and image and to unleash the poetic potential of the photographic. By making photographic copies of the texts and highlighting individual letters and words, she brings ‘hidden’ poems into light. In A Poem by Repetition by Allen Ginsberg, for example, Czech left only the letters constituting Ginsberg’s lines from 1951 and masked out the rest from a magazine interview. Dispersed across three columns, the highlighted text reads: “I made love to myself in the mirror kissing my own lips, saying I love myself, I love you more than anything.” The same illustrated page is progressively magnified from left to right. A recreated version of each image becomes unique, as different series of letters are highlighted, with the ‘new’ decoded text within the existing text deconstructing the integrity of the original. By setting the letters free, the artist now allows multiple ways of reading or looking at the text. Released from their initial semantic functions, the black letters seem to be set in motion, corresponding visually to the exaggerated movements of the famous black and white drawings Men in the City by Robert Longo.

More by Natalie Czech: natalieczech.de